Stimulus Control, Controlling Stimulus

If you are your environment, then you should start changing your environment

You get into the car, and the car gets into you. You go into the house, and the house goes into you. You enter a relationship, and the relationship enters you.

There is a blurry line between ourselves and our environment. The things, places, and people who surround us mix with our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. They influence and sometimes even determine them.

Buddhists call this dependent co-origination. Behaviorists also have a word for it: stimulus control. The idea is that cues in your environment prompt you to act in certain ways. You see a comfortable couch, and you want to sit down. You smell coffee brewing, and you want to pour yourself a cup. These associations can be learned, of course, as Pavlov showed with dogs, bells and salivation. We now call that classical conditioning.

Pavlov’s followers further demonstrated that animals can be trained to perform certain tasks to achieve an end—like a rat pushing a button to get a pellet of food. Operant conditioning.

Hearing this, many people are dismayed to think that we humans are so easily controlled. For this reason and many others, B.F. Skinner fell from grace.

But there is another way to think about it. If we are, in a certain sense, fused with our environment, changing as it changes, the subjects of stimulus control, then we should simply alter that environment so that it pushes us to do what we want to do.

This is a form of freedom. And in fact, most people already do this in limited ways; for example, every time we set an alarm to prompt ourselves to wake up at a specific time, we have altered our environment to influence our own future behavior.

We're making small changes to our environment all the time, sometimes deliberately and sometimes not. But if we have a vision of the behaviors we want to perform regularly, we can shape our environment to support that.

My phone’s on grayscale. I made it boring because I wanted real-life to be the most exciting colors I see every day. That’s just one thing you can do with the devices that act as your exocortex. I list some others here!

Conversely, an empty water bottle sits on my desk so that when I get to the office in the morning, I remember to fill it and hydrate. Very small things like that make a huge difference for me.

The rule is: make bad things boring, invisible, hard to access and unrewarding. Make good things exciting, obvious, easy to access and wired up with rewards. The habits almost form themselves.